Subject: Re: [xsl] Non-English languages in XSLT, XML Schema grammars From: Michael Müller-Hillebrand <mmh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2008 10:37:10 +0200 |
I had a question. Why is it that languages like XML Schema, XSLT etc allow only English in the element and attribute names ? I am not referring to the content, but the actual elements and attributes defined by the grammar. i.e. <schema>, <template>, <call-template>, <for-each>, <element>, <attribute> etc.... Does it make any sense at all to allow these grammars itself to support writing schemas/xslts etc in local languages.
As a practical example, I was involved in changing the element and attribute names of a DTD from German into English to allow a wider audience to better understand their meaning. The major part of the work was to change existing documents, as you can guess.
Since XML allows almost all Unicode characters for element and attribute names, there is nothing to stop you from having the same grammar in multiple localizations. For XSL it would be rather easy to detect the current localization and to apply a preprocessing to transform those files into a (let's say) base language.
That this is not very likely to happen, could be connected to the fact that almost all programming languages I know use English wording. So at least programmers are very much used to that vocabulary. But if you think of XML authoring environments it could really improve the quality of how the content is tagged if the element/attribute names would be well-chosen and localized.
To bring his back to XSL: I guess it would be rather easy to create a solution to create localized DTDs/Schemas or to 'un-localize' documents based on a common table-like definition of names.
Any designer tool can then interpret the text as per the character encoding specified in the document declaration and render it according to the locale/language preferences.
I would not mess around with character encodings, I am so happy that Unicode/UTF-8 is almost everywhere now.
-- _______________________________________________________________ Michael M|ller-Hillebrand: Dokumentations-Technologie Adobe Certified Expert, FrameMaker Lvsungen und Training, FrameScript, XML/XSL, Unicode <http://cap-studio.de/> -- Tel. +49 (9131) 28747
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